In its half a century as a voice of the counterculture from its base in the Northeast Kingdom, Bread and Puppet Theater has dramatized the slaughter of civilians in the wars of Vietnam, Central America, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
But as Russia continues an invasion of Ukraine that has killed an estimated 7,000 Ukrainian civilians, the Glover-based political theater troupe has been conspicuously quiet on the conflict. Its leader, meanwhile, has blamed America and other Western countries for its start, leading some, including former members of the theater, to question its response.
Asked about Bread and Puppet’s position on the war early last month, 88-year-old founder and director Peter Schumann told VTDigger that the conflict resulted from American “warmongering.” He said nothing about civilian casualties or alleged Russian war crimes.
“The Ukraine war is a profiteering war for America with weapons selling and weapons making, and it’s also disguising the fact that America wants to wage World War III,” he said at the time.
Asked for clarification two weeks later, Schumann said, “To go into the analysis of what is happening in Ukraine from just that idea that there is the Evil Knievel Mr. Putin going in there and bombarding civilians is so totally naïve and not true.” But Schumann also said of the Ukrainian civilian casualties, “I cry for them. It’s horrible what’s being done.”
Bread and Puppet has so far produced two pieces about the war and neither explicitly addresses civilian casualties or Russian war crimes.
Both were performed at the group’s farm in Glover last summer. One warned of the danger of world war. The other focused on the widow of a man killed by warplanes, but the identity of the man and the planes was left unsaid. That act was also part of the Bread and Puppet cross-country fall tour that ended in New York earlier this month.
The theater’s ideological stance on the conflict is not clear yet, according to Michael Romanyshyn, who joined the company in 1975 and now makes birch syrup in Maine. Romanyshyn said the theater’s difficulty developing its stance is tied to Bread and Puppet’s long-running opposition to American militarism.
“How to untangle that with the war in Ukraine, I think, is hard,” Romanyshyn said. “Bread and Puppet sees its responsibility as speaking about America’s role in the world. That really shapes the politics of the theater. That’s how Peter sees the theater’s role.”
A harsher assessment is offered by Ian Thal, a playwright and theater critic for Washington City Paper who performed with Bread and Puppet in the early 2000s when he lived in the Boston area.
“Schumann sees the U.S. as an embodiment of radical evil in the world and since Russia is an adversary of the U.S., his reflexive anti-Americanism overrules any sympathy he might have for the Ukrainians,” Thal said. “It renders Schumann unwilling to criticize Putin's government or geopolitical ambitions.”
An exhibition of Schumann’s paintings that critics said equated the policies of the Israeli government with those of Nazi Germany prompted Thal’s bitter departure from the theater. Schumann insisted that his paintings were misinterpreted.
One of the acts about Ukraine performed for the “Apocalypse Defiance Circus” held at Bread and Puppet’s farm last July featured puppeteers chanting, “An aggressive world war needs to be prepared.” A sign held aloft attributed the line to Eldridge A. Colby, a member of the “Council of Foreign Destruction.” Colby is actually a member of the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the U.S. Department of Defense during the Trump administration.
Asked why the circus act didn’t mention civilian casualties or Russian war crimes, Schumann replied, “Not everything fits into a circus act ... I don’t pretend our circus represented it correctly. There should’ve been more.”
Asked if Bread and Puppet is planning to focus more on Ukraine, Schumann replied, “Very definitely.” He said a workshop this month at the farm for nearby residents will rehearse, then perform new material in front of Northeast Kingdom supermarkets on weekends. Some of that new material will be about Ukraine, Schumann said.
While the fall tour of the “Apocalypse Defiance Circus” was under way, there was an act focused on Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip, noting that over the course of three days in August this year, 46 Palestinians were killed, more than 300 were wounded and 55 homes were demolished by Israel. The recitation of the grim statistics was accompanied by the sad strains of a violin.
On Dec. 18, the day the tour concluded in Manhattan, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that so far 6,826 Ukrainians had been killed in the war and 10,769 Ukrainians had been injured.
During the fall tour, investigative reports exposing Russian massacres of civilians and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children made headlines, but the circus only vaguely addressed the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine. The act was performed in only the first 21 stops of the tour’s 79 shows, according to Josh Krugman, coordinator of the tour.
The five-minute piece featured a woman holding a baby and a raven dressed in a suit and tie. A somber Ukrainian folk song called “The Widow” was sung and the raven recited an English translation of its unsettling lyrics. The mother asks the raven if he knows the whereabouts of her husband and learns the raven visits the husband three times a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Eight puppeteers with their arms outstretched walk on to the scene. They are meant to depict fighter planes, according to Krugman. A video of the act performed at Wells College in upstate New York on Sept. 14 shows it concluding with a puppeteer holding a sign that says “No War” in English, Russian and Ukrainian.
The act is vague about the dead husband’s identity. Was he Ukrainian or Russian? Was he a civilian or a soldier? Were the fighter planes Russian or Ukrainian? The audience was offered no clue.
Paul Zaloom, a Goddard College student who joined Bread and Puppet at age 19 and still considers himself a member of the theater 52 years later, thought the raven and widow act was strong and said that, to him, it was clear what the act was about.
“What was happening in Ukraine was addressed, just in a very different style than the Palestinian act,” he told VTDigger. “One of them has explicit statistics in it, the other one is a much more expressionist or a classic Bread and Puppet act. There are various levels of explicitness in how Peter and the theater articulate things. You have a wide range of ways that things are expressed, from quite explicit to much vaguer."
An earlier version of the act — performed at the Bread and Puppet farm in Glover prior to the fall tour — had a different sign at the end. It said, “Russia, U.S., NATO Out of Ukraine,” according to the act's creator, Maria Schumann, the daughter of Peter Schumann.
During the fall tour, many in the company didn’t agree with the original sign because it criticized NATO, according to John Bell, a Bread and Puppet veteran who serves on its board of directors. Bell visited the troupe with his wife, Trudi Cohen, when they were in the southwestern U.S. in November as the touring company of 25 puppeteers made their way to the West Coast.
Asked if he thought some might be disappointed in the theater’s response to the war in Ukraine, Bell responded: “Sure. I could imagine that.”
The act was performed until the westward-bound tour reached St. Louis, according to Krugman, but was pulled from the show because it was deemed long and slow. There was also a fear, he said, that the Ukrainian folk song’s gory lyrics were a bit much. (The raven announces that he ate the husband’s eyeballs and drank his “hot blood.”)
When the tour arrived in Seattle, there was a lengthy discussion about whether to bring the act back or create a new act about Ukraine, according to Krugman. The company started rehearsing a new act, he said, but it didn’t make it into the show.
Several Bread and Puppet alumni told VTDigger they believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal and that its war crimes are obvious. Some said they were surprised that Schumann hasn’t focused more on the toll of the war on civilians, given that as a young boy he and his family fled their home in Silesia during World War II and he personally witnessed bombings and saw dead bodies. Still, some alumni said they weren’t surprised Schumann doesn’t see the Ukraine conflict as having a clear victim or perpetrator.
“It's complicated,” said Bell. “I think some folks in the theater, maybe including Peter, are sympathetic to this idea on the left that is critical of NATO. Some would say wanting Ukraine to join NATO and the (possible) NATO expansion to the border of Russia is provocative.”
Nearly 30 years ago, as the city of Sarajevo was under sniper fire and shelling from Serbian forces, Schumann shocked longtime observers of Bread and Puppet when he voiced support for NATO air strikes against Serbian gun positions in the mountains around the city. Schumann went to Sarajevo in December 1993 and returned in April 1994 with Romanyshyn to produce theater.
But now Schumann opposes NATO or U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
“Ukraine is a pawn of the U.S., just as NATO is,” said Schumann. “The U.S. has big plans for preserving its hegemony as a superpower in the world. It’s preparing wars to weaken Russia.”
Schumann does not deny that the aerial bombardment unleashed by “Mr. Putin and colleagues” has been a horror for the Ukrainians. But he insisted that the Ukrainians are also responsible for some of the horror in the conflict, especially in the Donbas region in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
“The neo-Nazis have armies in Ukraine and they violated those border towns incredibly,” said Schumann. “To not report on this and to leave that background out of it is just shamelessly wrong. What you get in the Western press is a super-simple fairy tale that has very little to do with the truth.”
The neo-Nazi armies Schumann cites are the so-called Azov Movement, which was formed in early 2014 as an anti-Russia militia and is considered a white nationalist group. The alleged existence of Nazis in Ukraine was cited by Vladimir Putin as part of his justification for the Russian invasion.
Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar who is well versed in Ukrainian history during the 20th century, dismissed Schumann’s concerns about neo-Nazis.
The idea that “this is a neo-Nazi thing just can’t hold any water,” said Berenbaum. “Is there an extreme far right group in Ukraine? Of that I have no doubt. But I also have no doubt that the United States has a far right group. So does Israel, France and Germany. The fact is that you have a Jew as president of Ukraine whose grandfather was one of the fighters for the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.”
Berenbaum said that some Russian actions in Ukraine can be considered as fulfilling elements of the U.N. definition of genocide.
Schumann said he believes that Ukraine does have a right to defend itself but still opposes U.S., European Union and NATO military assistance to the country, without which analysts believe Ukraine would have little chance of surviving the Russian onslaught.
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